eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

August 2012

08/28/2012

I think this review will require a little
introduction. And since it is early in the morning and I have the time I might
as well supply some.

Understanding the point of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Pursuit of the Well Beloved may
require a peek back into Greek philosophy. Plato argues that there are abstract
ideals that we all can imagine with our minds that we may not be able to see
with our eyes. He calls these ideals, “the forms.” The main words, εἶδος
(eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) comes from an
earlier word meaning “to see.” It was the prerogative of the gifted and the
wise to see these unseen forms by deducing what they looked like from their
imperfect manifestations. Thus, one might see many imperfect horses and deduce
what the perfect “form horse” would look like if they could see it. These forms do not exist in time or space so they can
only be glimpsed by means of thought. Once glimpsed, the artist, the architect,
the painter, and most celebrated, the sculptor could bring them into the world
of sense for others. For Plato, the pursuit of an understanding of the forms
was something of a philosophical obsession. I suppose it might be akin to a
surfer looking his whole life for the perfect wave or a dog breeder for the
perfect dog or a connoisseur for the perfect wine. A vision of the perfect is
for the Platonist, “the pearl of great price.”

I will just note that Hardy’s main character in The Pursuit of the Beloved is a sculptor
and he has something of an addiction for what he calls “The Well Beloved” –
essentially, a vision of the feminine ideal that he hopes to “capture” in some
way. More on that in a moment.

It is worth noting that this pursuit of perfection
is something that gets culturally expressed in a variety of ways. There are Stoic
versions of it and Christian versions of it and Buddhist versions of it and
Hindu versions of it. There are Hedonist versions and Utilitarian versions and
Daoist versions. And I deal with many of them in the course of several of my
classes. For example, the Stoic version of perfection is a life of complete equanimity
and repose. For the Stoic, life perfectly lived is life undisturbed by anything
external. One uses their minds to bend their emotions to their will. “Men are
disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things,”
Epictetus says, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you
wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a
tranquil flow of life.” Nothing, says Epictetus should be allowed to disturb
that perfect repose.

“Never say about
anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It
has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate
been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored?”

In many ways, this pursuit of perfect sublime repose
was translated into Christianity and the anti upped as Paul asserts that the
ideal of the Stoics (a state of emotional stasis) is not to be compared with the
Christian ideal of a state of perpetual joy. Thus in Philippians, Paul asserts not that he
is merely content in all circumstances
but that he is joyful in all circumstances.
For Paul, the character of Christ takes on the same role as “the form” in Greek
philosophy. Only it is a form incarnate. “In your
relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus,”
he writes the Philippian church, describing to them how life is to be a pursuit
of “Christilingness” (my word). In
Paul’s mind, the pursuit of the life that empties itself of its own
self-centeredness is the pursuit of the only ideal worth aspiring to.

This, of course, will provoke many religious and philosophical
counter-arguments throughout the last 2,000 years of Western History. Ayn Rand
will argue that Paul has gotten it all wrong and that the perfection that one
should pursue is a perfection of reason and self-reliance not faith and
dependence. “Achievement
of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life,” she writes,

“and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence,
is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of
your loyalty to the achievement of your values. . . . I swear, by my life and
my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask
another man to live for mine. . . . If any civilization is to
survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.”

For
some, the perfect life is cast in material terms. It is about the pursuit of
stuff – of more and better stuff. For others, it is about the reduction of work
down to zero. “I got a C in that class and I did not even open the book,” I
heard one student say to another in a computer lab at college one day. “Yeah.
Well I got a B and I never even bought
the book,” says another. Ultimately, for them, the “pursuit of the well beloved
(the ideal that mattered to them) was a pursuit of the most reward for the
least work. I suspect that we all know someone like that. I might add that
others might see an ideal domestic life as their ideal. Others, perfect
knowledge of something. Others perfect children.

But
I digress. Lets get back to the subject at hand; Thomas Hardy’s novel. In The Pursuit of the Well Beloved, the
main character, a talented sculptor by the name of Jocelyn Pierston finds
himself as a young man on a search for what he calls “The well-beloved” an
incarnation of the feminine ideal. For him it is both an artistic and a
romantic quest. Alas, his “problem” is that this ideal keeps moving from person
to person. One is reminded of Shakespeare’s Romeo who opens the play by despondently
telling his cousin Benvolio of the surpassing perfections of his lasted
heartthrob, Rosalind. Romeo’s affections being unrequited, Benvolio tells Romeo
to look elsewhere. “Be ruled by me, forget
to think of her, says Benvolio. “O,
teach me how I should forget to think,” replies Romeo. “By
giving liberty unto thine eyes;” Benvolio advises, “Examine
other beauties.”

To this, Romeo infers that it will be impossible to
replace Rosalind as none can compare (of course we all know that he is about to
find exactly such a one in a matter of hours). Soon the despondant Romeo will
be gazing into the hypnotizing crystal orbs of Juliet’s eyes and forgetting
Rosalind ever existed.

Here is how Hardy describes Jocelyn Pierston’s
frustrated search for his ideal.

"To his intrinsic
Well−Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many embodiments.
Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Florence, Evangeline, or what−not, had
been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an
excuse or as a defense, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no
tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an
epitomised sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what
she really was; Pierston did not. He knew that he loved the Protean creature
wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes, black eyes, or brown; whether
presenting herself as tall, fragile, or plump. She was never in two places at
once; but hitherto she had never been in one place long."

"By making this clear to
himself some time before this date, he had escaped a good deal of ugly reproach
which he might otherwise have incurred from his own judgment, as being the very
embodiment of fickleness. It was simply that she who always attracted him, and
led him whither she would, as by a silken thread, had not remained the occupant
of the same fleshly tabernacle throughout her career so far. Whether she would
ultimately settle down into one, he could not say."

For Jocelyn Pierston, the ideal woman was, in his
mind, an undefined but migratory constant that flitted about from one actual
person to another. The reader will no doubt suspect that this theory might
provide perfect cover for a shameless philanderer wishing to see himself as the
epitome of faithfulness throughout what looks to be a “love-em-and-leave-em” romantic
lifestyle. Suffice it to say that for Jocelyn, his pursuit of the Platonic
ideal amounts to a search for a woman in whom the vision of the ideal will not
fade. “Good luck,” we might say to him.

The novel opens with Jocelyn burning old love
letters from his assorted “failed experiments.”

“He had no longer heart
to burn them. That packet, at least, he would preserve for the writer's sake,
notwithstanding that the person of the writer, wherever she might be, was now
but as an empty shell which had once contained his ideal for a transient time.”

Further on we read that Jocelyn Pierston,

“had quite disabused
his mind of the old−fashioned assumption that the idol of a man's fancy was an
integral part of the personality in which it might be located for a long or a
short while.”

Visiting his father back in his home town on an
Island off the coast of England, Jocelyn meets a childhood friend by the name
of Avice Caro, now a young woman that Pierston believes may well be the end of
his search. Let me just say at this point that if you have ever been “dumped”
by someone with a philosophy like Jocelyn Pierston, you know what sort of
yellow lights should be blinking on the dashboard of your romantic radar
detector at this point in the story. You find yourself whispering to the poor
lass “Don’t even look at this man you poor thing.” I can assure you that Jocelyn
Pierston is not going to be the sort of character that you read about to your
young children with hopes that they will appreciate his qualities and emulate
him. J.Pierston is a “player” to put it succinctly, eventually, a wealthy and successful
player, and a player with a philosophy to justify him, perhaps the most
dangerous kind.

But it should be noted that over the course of his
life, Hardy does show us a transitional trajectory in the character development
of his little Frankenstein. Over the course of his long life, Jocelyn Pierston’s
pursuit of “the well beloved” – at firs, simply to find her (or them), to
sculpt her (or them), to seduce her (or them), to buy her affections (or
theirs), to marry her (or them), and ultimately to own her (or them) – becomes a
quest to be the well-beloved. Over
time, he realizes that life cannot be an extended search for some ideal in
others, for that is chasing after the wind. That ideal can never survive the
intimacy that it inspires. What life can be is a pursuit of “well-belovedness.”
As Immanuel Kant says, morality is “not properly the doctrine of
how we are to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to become worthy
of happiness.”

By the end of his life, Pierston
has not stopped looking for his ideal (indeed, he finds reason to see it in
three generations of Avice Caros). But he does gain the sense that love for
these people entails sacrificing not that he might own them, but that they might find happiness.

Albert Einstein once said that “confusion
of goals and perfection of means” was the characteristic problem of modern
life. By this, I assume that he was suggesting that in life as we know it, we
are constantly getting better and better at pursuing goals that are less and
less worthy and that ultimately we will develop the perfect tool and the
perfect app for achieving precisely the perfection that we thought most
important, only to find that we had aimed entirely in the wrong direction.

“What shall it profit a man to gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?” we might well ask ourselves again. It
takes Jocelyn Pierston a lifetime to learn what he might have benefitted
himself much to know at the age of 20. But can we not all say the same of
ourselves?

Question
for Comment: What does your “pursuit of the
well beloved” look like?

08/26/2012

“If being labeled a transcendentalist means that I
have an active mind frequently busy with large topics I hope it is so." - Margaret
Fuller Ossoli

I just finished the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. I think I would like her. Though
critics say that the memoir is not always accurate and that no one could have
accurately described Margaret Fuller in words anyway, it is a good read. “There
are three kinds of people in the world,” Edgar Allen Poe is said to have
remarked, “Men, women, and Margaret Fuller.” One man complained that she came
with “too many weapons,” inferring I suppose that she was too smart to play the
role of a good 19th century woman in a man’s life.

Margaret Fuller was drowned with her husband and two
year old son off the coast of New York City in July of 1850 and her friends,
primarily Emerson, hurriedly assembled a memoir to her that became one of the
best-selling biographies of the 19th Century. It is hard to know
sometimes if Emerson is using Margaret Fuller as a foil for his own
transcendentalist ideals (there is a certain irony to the fact that Emerson’s
descriptions of Fuller are a retelling of his assertions about what it means to
be a good Transcendentalist) but regardless, Margaret Fuller was a vessel that
could hold them with room to spare apparently. Here are the things that Margaret
Fuller’s acquaintances wanted people to remember about her. As you read, ask
yourself if you know anyone like her.

“The earliest
recollection of Margaret is as a schoolmate of my sisters, in Boston. At that
period she was considered a prodigy of talent and accomplishment; but a sad
feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to
train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue
application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of
thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of
frivolous companions.”

“It was impossible not to admire her fluency and fun; yet, though
curiosity was piqued as to this entertaining personage, I never sought an
introduction, but, on the contrary, rather shunned encounter with one so armed
from head to foot in saucy sprightliness.”

“At first, her vivacity, decisive tone, downrightness, and contempt of
conventional standards, continued to repel. She appeared too intense in
expression, action, emphasis, to be pleasing, and wanting in that retenue which
we associate with delicate dignity. Occasionally, also, words flashed from her
of such scathing satire, that prudence counseled the keeping at safe distance
from a body so surcharged with electricity.”

“Finally, to the coolly-scanning eye, her friendships wore a look of such
romantic exaggeration, that she seemed to walk enveloped in a shining fog of sentimentalism.”

“By power to quicken
other minds, she showed how living was her own.”

“She was affluent in
historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as in novel hints. She
knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the essential truth gathered from
wide research, and distilled with patient toil; and by skilful treatment she
could make green again the wastes of common-place.”

“Always I found her
open-eyed to beauty, fresh for wonder, with wings poised for flight, and
fanning the coming breeze of inspiration. Always she seemed to see before her,

"A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
And the invisible rain did ever sing
A silver music on the mossy lawn."

“She was, indeed, The
Friend. This was her vocation. She bore at her girdle a golden key to unlock
all caskets of confidence. Into whatever home she entered she brought a
benediction of truth, justice, tolerance, and honor; and to everyone who sought
her to confess, or seek counsel, she spoke the needed word of stern yet
benignant wisdom. To how many was the forming of her acquaintance an era of
renovation, of awakening from sloth, indulgence or despair, to heroic mastery
of fate, of inward serenity and strength, of new-birth to real self-hood, of
catholic sympathies, of energy consecrated to the Supreme Good.

“She felt, too, that
Society was not a machine to be put together and set in motion, but a living
body, whose breath must be Divine inspiration, and whose healthful growth is
only hindered by forcing.”

“She knew, not only theoretically, but practically, how endless are the
diversities of human character and of Divine discipline, and she reverenced
fellow-spirits too sincerely ever to wish to warp them to her will, or to
repress their normal development. She was stern but in one claim, that each
should be faithful to apparent leadings of the Truth; “

“In the world of
imagination, she had discharged the stormful energy which would have been
destructive in actual life. And in thought she had bound herself to the mast
while sailing past the Sirens.”

“The characteristic
trait of Margaret, to which all her talents and acquirements were subordinate,
was sympathy,—universal sympathy. She had that large intelligence and
magnanimity which enabled her to comprehend the struggles and triumphs of every
form of character. Loving all about her, whether rich or poor, rude or
cultivated, as equally formed after a Divine Original, with an equal
birth-right of immortal growth, she regarded rather their aspirations than
their accomplishments. And this was the source of her marvellous influence. Those
who had never thought of their own destiny, nor put faith in their own
faculties, found in her society not so much a display of her gifts, as
surprising discoveries of their own. She revealed to them the truth, that all
can be noble by fidelity to the highest self.”

“I have never met
another in whom the inspiring hope of Immortality was so strengthened into
profoundest conviction. She did not believe in our future and unending existence,—she
knew it, and lived ever in the broad glare of its morning twilight. With a
limited income and liberal wants, she was yet generous beyond the bounds of
reason. Had the gold of California been all her own, she would have disbursed
nine tenths of it in eager and well-directed efforts to stay, or at least
diminish, the flood of human misery.”

“She never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do, nor what
would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, 'Is it the truth? Is it
such as the public should know?' And if her judgment answered, 'Yes,' she
uttered it; no matter what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might
draw down on her own head. Perfect conscientiousness was an unfailing
characteristic of her literary efforts.”

“I think, if she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all
female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of Virtue, would have been one
of her most cherished and first realized conceptions.”

"Her love of children was one of her most prominent characteristics. The
pleasure she enjoyed in their society was fully counterpoised by that she
imparted. To them she was never lofty, nor reserved, nor mystical; for no one
had ever a more perfect faculty for entering into their sports, their feelings,
their enjoyments. She could narrate almost any story in language level to their
capacities, and in a manner calculated to bring out their hearty and often
boisterously expressed delight.”

Hawthorn may well have been imagining Margaret
Fuller when he created the character rof Hester Prynne. Naturally, Margaret
herself was not always this prone to eulogize herself. She did have a
relatively rubust sense of self-confidence but she by no means saw a saint when
she looked in the mirror. Here are some things that she said about herself.

'All the good I have
ever done has been by calling on every nature for its highest.”

'My fault is that I
think I feel too much. O that my friends would teach me that "simple art
of not too much!" How can I expect them to bear the ceaseless eloquence of
my nature?'

Further, she seems to have realized at times that
her intelligence could be used as a weapon and she seems to have tried to bring
it (and the inclination to show off an erudition that, in her case, she had) into
subjection to her compassionate instincts. 'Father, let me not injure my
fellows during this period of repression,” she wrote in her journal,

“I feel that when we
meet my tones are not so sweet as I would have them. O, let me not wound! I,
who know so well how wounds can burn and ache, should not inflict them. Let my
touch be light and gentle. Let me keep myself uninvaded, but let me not fail to
be kind and tender, when need is. Yet I would not assume an overstrained poetic
magnanimity. Help me to do just right, and no more. O, make truth profound and
simple in me!”

Fuller had one of those minds that was both full and
open. By that, I mean she had a lot of material to work with AND she had easy
access to it (perhaps too much material and too much access). This reality is
something that she sensed made her different. She tried, not always successfully,
to avoid thinking that it made her “better.” “There is a mortifying sense,” she
writes,

'of having played the
Mirabeau [A French orator from the French Revolution] after a talk with a
circle of intelligent persons. They come with a store of acquired knowledge and
reflection, on the subject in debate, about which I may know little, and have
reflected less; yet, by mere apprehensiveness and prompt intuition, I may
appear their superior. Spontaneously I appropriate all their material, and turn
it to my own ends, as if it was my inheritance from a long train of ancestors.
Rays of truth flash out at the moment, and they are startled by the light
thrown over their familiar domain. Still they are gainers, for I give them new
impulse, and they go on their way rejoicing in the bright glimpses they have
caught. I should despise myself, if I purposely appeared thus brilliant, but I
am inspired as by a power higher than my own.'

Margaret Fuller often suffered from migraine
headaches (perhaps from reading too much) that could literally disable her. Her
memoir contains a few of her reflections about the physical infirmities that
she felt kept her from accomplishing all that she might wish to accomplish.

'A week of more
suffering than I have had for a long time,—from Sunday to Sunday,—headache
night and day! And not only there has been no respite, but it has been fixed in
one spot—between the eyebrows!—what does that promise?—till it grew real
torture. Then it has been depressing to be able to do so little, when there was
so much I had at heart to do.

'I go on very
moderately, for my strength is not great, and I am connected with one who is
anxious that I should not overtask it. Body and mind, I have long required rest
and mere amusement, and now obey Nature as much as I can. If she pleases to
restore me to an energetic state, she will by-and-by; if not, I can only hope
this world will not turn me out of doors too abruptly."

There are over 400 pages just in volume 2 of this
memoir so I think I will focus on four specific matters of interest to me; How the
Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli might be used to teach Romanticism or
Transcendentalism; What the relationship between Transcendentalism and
Christian faith might be in the life of an individual like Margaret Fuller;
What Margaret Fuller means to the history of male-female relationships in
America; and how Margaret Fuller wound up marrying such an unlikely partner.

First, regarding Romanticism. Margaret Fuller had the opportunity to meet a
number of the “neo-Romantics” of her age. She also had a profound intellectual
grasp of the writings of the Romantic “greats.” Here is her account of
experiencing original manuscripts of Jean Jaques Rousseau:

“To the actually
so-called Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the manuscripts of
Rousseau treasured in their library. I saw them and touched them,—those
manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper,
tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I
seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive,
with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we
most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his
actual life made some detours through villanous places; but his spirit was
intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught with
prophecy. There is none who has given birth to more life for this age; his
gifts are yet untold; they are too present with us; but he who thinks really
must often think with Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the
method of genius,—to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they
complain.

Second, the issue of Transcendentalism. Margaret Fuller
was one of the few women allowed into the “old boys network” of the
Transcendentalist club in Concord. She was also invited to write for and edit The Dial, the primary publication of the
Transcendentalist movement. She was also invited to spend time at Brook Farm,
the primary expression of Transcendentalist utopianism. “If being labeled a transcendentalist means that
I have an active mind frequently busy with large topics,” she wrote, “I hope it
is so." “I agree with those who think that no true philosophy will try to
ignore or annihilate the material part of man,” she explained, “but will rather
seek to put it in its place, as servant and minister to the soul.”

Emerson seems to feel the need to explain the nature
of the Transcendentalist movement before trying to explain the part that Fuller
played in it.

“The summer of 1839 saw
the full dawn of the Transcendental movement in New England. The rise of this
enthusiasm was as mysterious as that of any form of revival; and only they who
were of the faith could comprehend how bright was this morning-time of a new hope.
Transcendentalism was an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the
immanence of Divinity in instinct.”

“. . . The result was a vague yet
exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit.
Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the
idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the
soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred
Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted.
Amidst materialists, zealots, and skeptics, the Transcendentalist believed in
perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to
universal good. He sought to hold communion face to face with the unnameable
Spirit of his spirit, and gave himself up to the embrace of nature's beautiful
joy, as a babe seeks the breast of a mother.”

“The past might be well enough for those who, without make-belief, could yet
put faith in common dogmas and usages; but for them the matin-bells of a new
day were chiming, and the herald-trump of freedom was heard upon the mountains.
Hence, leaving ecclesiastical organizations, political parties, and familiar
circles, which to them were brown with drought, they sought in covert nooks of
friendship for running waters, and fruit from the tree of life. The journal,
the letter, became of greater worth than the printed page; for they felt that
systematic results were not yet to be looked for, and that in sallies of
conjecture, glimpses and flights of ecstasy, the "Newness" lifted her
veil to her votaries. Thus, by mere attraction of affinity, grew together the
brotherhood of the "Like-minded," as they were pleasantly nicknamed
by outsiders, and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same
opinion. The only password of membership to this association, which had no
compact, records, or officers, was a hopeful and liberal spirit; and its chance
conventions were determined merely by the desire of the caller for a
"talk," or by the arrival of some guest from a distance with a budget
of presumptive novelties. Its "symposium" was a picnic, whereto each
brought of his gains, as he felt prompted, a bunch of wild grapes from the
woods, or bread-corn from his threshing-floor. The tone of the assemblies was cordial
welcome for every one's peculiarity; and scholars, farmers, mechanics,
merchants, married women, and maidens, met there on a level of courteous
respect. The only guest not tolerated was intolerance; though strict justice
might add, that these "Illuminati" were as unconscious of their
special cant as smokers are of the perfume of their weed, and that a professed
declaration of universal independence turned out in practice to be rather
oligarchic.”

Understanding the nature of the movement that she
felt caught up in makes it easier to understand Margaret Fuller’s sense of her
religious views. She seems to have shared the same criticism that forced the
revivalists of the 2nd Great Awakening and the Unitarians like
Emerson out of their New England churches. “I have let myself be cheated out of
my Sunday, by going to hear Mr. ——,” she says of one of the ministers she went
to hear (can you imagine preaching a sermon with Margaret Fuller in the
congregation?)

“As he began by reading
the first chapter of Isaiah, and the fourth of John's Epistle, I made mental
comments with pure delight. "Bring no more vain oblations."
"Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God." "We
know that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because he hath given us of the
Spirit." Then pealed the organ, full of solemn assurance. But straightway
uprose the preacher to deny mysteries, to deny the second birth, to deny
influx, and to renounce the sovereign gift of insight, for the sake of what he
deemed a "rational" exercise of will. As he spoke I could not choose
but deny him all through, and could scarce refrain from rising to expound, in
the light of my own faith, the words of those wiser Jews which had been read.
Was it not a sin to exchange friendly greeting as we parted, and yet tell him
no word of what was in my mind?

'Still I saw why he looked at things as he did. The old religionists did talk
about "grace, conversion," and the like, technically, without
striving to enter into the idea, till they quite lost sight of it. Undervaluing
the intellect, they became slaves of a sect, instead of organs of the Spirit.

Mr. —— is heard because, though he has not entered into the secret of piety, he
wishes to be heard, and with a good purpose,—can make a forcible statement, and
kindle himself with his own thoughts.”

“It would be doing injustice to a person like
Margaret, always more enthusiastic than philosophical, to attribute to her
anything like a system of theology;” says Emerson in the Memoir,

“for, hopeful,
reverent, aspiring, and free from skepticism, she felt too profoundly the
vastness of the universe and of destiny ever to presume that with her span rule
she could measure the Infinite.”

Emerson records Margaret Fuller’s attempt at establishing
a creed for herself. “I see a necessity, in the character of Jesus,” she wrote
there with some measure of veiled restraint,

“Why Abraham should
have been the founder of his nation, Moses its lawgiver, and David its king and
poet. I believe in the genesis of the patriarchs, as given in the Old
Testament. I believe in the prophets,—that they foreknew not only what their
nation longed for, but what the development of universal Man requires,—a
Redeemer, an Atoner, a Lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world. I
believe that Jesus came when the time was ripe, and that he was peculiarly a
messenger and Son of God. I have nothing to say in denial of the story of his
birth; whatever the actual circumstances were, he was born of a Virgin, and the
tale expresses a truth of the soul. I have no objection to the miracles, except
where they do not happen to please one's feelings. Why should not a spirit, so
consecrate and intent, develop new laws, and make matter plastic? I can imagine
him walking the waves, without any violation of my usual habits of thought. He
could not remain in the tomb, they say; certainly not,—death is impossible to
such a being. He remained upon earth; most true, and all who have met him since
on the way, have felt their hearts burn within them. He ascended to heaven;
surely, how could it be otherwise?”

'Would I could express with some depth what I feel as to religion in my very
soul; it would be a clear note of calm assurance. But for the present this must
suffice with regard to Christ. I am grateful here, as everywhere, when Spirit
bears fruit in fulness; it attests the justice of aspiration, it kindles faith,
it rebukes sloth, it enlightens resolve. But so does a beautiful infant.
Christ's life is only one modification of the universal harmony. I will not
loathe sects, perpersuasions, systems, though I cannot abide in them one
moment, for I see that by most men they are still needed. To them their
banners, their tents; let them be Fire-worshippers, Platonists, Christians; let
them live in the shadow of past revelations. But, oh, Father of our souls, the
One, let me seek Thee! I would seek Thee in these forms, and in proportion as
they reveal Thee, they teach me to go beyond themselves. I would learn from
them all, looking only to Thee! But let me set no limits from the past, to my
own soul, or to any soul.”

What appears from this account of faith is a rather
Quaker approach to revealed religion – a refusal to either deny the revelatory
nature of a past not lived or to prohibit oneself from the hope of experiencing
God themselves for themselves. “Ages may not produce one worthy to loose the
shoes of the Prophet of Nazareth;” Fuller writes,

“yet there will surely
be another manifestation of that Word which was in the beginning. And all
future manifestations will come, like Christianity, "not to destroy the
law and the prophets, but to fulfill." The very greatness of this
manifestation demands a greater.”

No religion
can perhaps long sustain an assertion that their great prophet is just the
latest in what will be an endless parade of great prophets (Maybe Buddhism
can). I suspect that on this issue, Margaret Fuller would fail to obtain
membership in any self-respecting evangelical church today. I wonder if that
would be their loss or gain? How disqualifying this openness to another Christ
would be in heaven will be for heaven to decide I guess.

My third theme will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with Fuller’s
primary literary work, Women in the 19th
Century. Fuller was a proponent of change in the relationships between men
and women. She made a clear argument that men and women were different along a
spectrum and were not so different as to be regarded two classifications of a
species. “Society is now so complex, that it is no longer possible to educate
woman merely as woman;” she wrote in her manifesto,

“The tasks which come
to her hand are so various, and so large a proportion of women are thrown
entirely upon their own resources. I admit that this is not their state of
perfect development; but it seems as if heaven, having so long issued its edict
in poetry and religion, without securing intelligent obedience, now commanded
the world in prose, to take a high and rational view. The lesson reads to me
thus:—

'Sex, like rank, wealth, beauty, or talent, is but an accident of birth. As you
would not educate a soul to be an aristocrat, so do not to be a woman. A
general regard to her usual sphere is dictated in the economy of nature. You
need never enforce these provisions rigorously.

“Man, do not prescribe how the Divine shall display itself in woman. Woman, do
not expect to see all of God in man.”

"Let them be Sea Captains!" she famously said of of women's sphere - though friends would often note that she expected men to be chivalrous with her. Of the institution of marriage, Fuller asserted that
“a man should deserve [his wife’s] love as an inheritance, rather than seize
and guard it like a prey.”

Which, brings us to my final topic; Fuller’s
marriage to Giovanni Angelo Ossoli in Italy. By Fuller’s own reckoning, it was
a strange match. Fuller was probably the most educated female intellectual America
had yet produced and Giovanni Ossoli was almost entirely without an education
and could not speak English. Because of legal and financial issues relating to
Ossoli’s family inheritance, the two kept their marriage a secret even in Italy
until it became clear that he would never receive any inheritance whatsoever
(he came from a Catholic family that would have probably excluded him from it
for marrying a Protestant). “How will it affect you to know that I have united
my destiny with that of an obscure young man,” Fuller wrote her mother of her
marriage, “—younger than myself; a person of no intellectual culture, and in
whom, in short, you will see no reason for my choosing;”

Here is what the memoir records from Fuller’s
letters. Use your own intuitions about the life of the mind and the soul and
the body. Where do you think this decision came from? We start with excerpts
from Fuller’s letters explaining herself and her relationship to Ossoli to her
friends and family back home.

“He is not in any
respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with me. He had
no instructor except an old priest, who entirely neglected his education; and
of all that is contained in books he is absolutely ignorant, and he has no
enthusiasm of character.”

“Amid many ills and
cares, we have had much joy together, in the sympathy with natural beauty,—with
our child,—with all that is innocent and sweet.”

“I do not know whether
he will always love me so well, for I am the elder, and the difference will
become, in a few years, more perceptible than now. But life is so uncertain,
and it is so necessary to take good things with their limitations, that I have
not thought it worth while to calculate too curiously.”

“I presume that, to many of my friends, he will be nothing, and they will not understand
that I should have life in common with him. But I do not think he will care;—he
has not the slightest tinges of self-love.”

“Yet I feel great
confidence in the permanence of his love. It has been unblemished so far, under
many trials; especially as I have been more desponding and unreasonable, in
many ways, than I ever was before, and more so, I hope, than I ever shall be
again. But at all such times, he never had a thought except to sustain and
cheer me. He is capable of the sacred love,—the love passing that of woman. He
showed it to his father, to Rome, to me. Now he loves his child in the same
way. I think he will be an excellent father, though he could not speculate
about it, nor, indeed, about anything.”

“The friction that I have seen mar so much the domestic happiness of others
does not occur with us, or, at least, has not occurred. Then, there is the
pleasure of always being at hand to help one another.”

“My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except my mother
or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does. To some, I have been
obliged to make myself known; others have loved me with a mixture of fancy and
enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life. But Ossoli loves me from
simple affinity;—he loves to be with me, and to serve and soothe me.”

“Ossoli, too, will be a good father. He has very little of what is called
intellectual development, but unspoiled instincts, affections pure and
constant, and a quiet sense of duty, which, to me,—who have seen much of the
great faults in characters of enthusiasm and genius,—seems of highest value.”

“What shall I say of my
child? All might seem hyperbole, even to my dearest mother. In him I find
satisfaction, for the first time, to the deep wants of my heart. Yet, thinking
of those other sweet ones fled [she is referring to children in her life that
she had been attached to but who had died i.e. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son,
Waldo], I must look upon him as a treasure only lent.”

I can only speculate but it seems to me that no
matter how powerful the intellect may be in a person, it never weakens the strength
of other human desires and instinct. Intellect may distract but it never
eradicates all the other aspects of personality. “Once I was almost all
intellect;” Fuller wrote from Italy,

“now I am almost all
feeling. Nature vindicates her rights, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the
Saxon crust. This cannot last long; I shall burn to ashes if all this smoulders
here much longer. I must die if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism.”

“Yes! I am weary, and
faith soars and sings no more. Nothing good of me is left except at the bottom
of the heart, a melting tenderness:”

For even Margaret Fuller, life as a mind sitting on
the shelf of a woman’s body was not enough. She needed all those things that
all people need. Tenderness. Affection. Love. Intimacy. A child. These were not
things that more encyclopedias or conversations with the men who wrote them
could give her. In the end, Margaret Fuller was just … human. I think she can be forgiven for that, and
should be.

“Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that,
amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful,
even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.” – Letter from
Margaret Fuller to her mother.

I for one would take her hand. It makes me sad that
her family was lost before it had a chance to prove to people that it would
have lasted in spite of its challenges.

Question for Comment: In this modern
world of facebook and email, do you think that it is more or less likely that
there will be anyone around with the ability to say who we were after we die?

08/20/2012

It is no secret to anyone who has ever read a Thomas Hardy book that his view of the world can be bleak – Hardy novels are one part Jane Austen, two parts Jack London, one part Edgar Allen Poe. In his last “great” novel, Jude the Obscure, the hero’s son hangs his step-siblings and in Tess of the D’Urbervilles the heroine herself is hung for murder. Hardy gives his characters one chance to align themselves with nature and their own instincts and if they fail, he dooms them to plot-line perdition throughout the rest of the story. He is not an author of second chances. “He was haunted by the sheer irrevocability of moments of decision and choice,” says Millgrave,

“ – the opportunity lost, the word unuttered, the road not taken, the beloved recognized or reclaimed too late. It is upon such moments, explored in all their irony and despair, that so many of his novels and stories turn, and some of the most poignant of his personal poems.”

Hardy himself in his letters affirms that he was not an optimist about fate. “The fact is that when you get to the bottom of things you find no bedrock of righteousness to rest on,” Hardy wrote in a letter that Millgate cites, (I suspect thinking both about human beings and the Providence that arranges their fates).

“ – nature is unmoral – & our puny efforts are those of people who try to keep their leaky house dry by wiping off the water drops from the ceiling.”

When accused of rampant pessimism, Hardy could only defend himself by claiming to be not a pessimist but “something like it.” Life was hard, he said, but primarily because people form societies and rules that make it so. How hard it would be if it were not for human constructs making it worse, he did not know. “People call me a pessimist;” he wrote,

“and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that ‘not to have been born is best’, then I do not reject the designation. But my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs . . . On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist [a philosophical position that argues that things which cannot be made perfect can at least be made better]. What are my books but one plea against man's inhumanity to man – to woman – and to the lower animals? Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much worse than it need be. When we have got rid of a thousand remediable ills, it will be time enough to determine whether the ill that is irremediable outweighs the good.”

I picked up a biography of Hardy the other day because I wanted to know more about where this harsh pessimism (or meliorism) came from. Michael Millgate’s treatment of his life did not disappoint. By and large, Millgate draws a picture of Hardy as an author, profoundly impacted by the New “science” of Charles Darwin and the central feminine influences of his life, his mother and his wife, Emma.

We can start with an understanding of Thomas Hardy’s mother, Jemima. “The devil played an active role in Jemima's morality,” says Millgate,

“and fate stood waiting with hand uplifted to knock down all human aspirations – the counterpart of Sue's conception, in Jude The Obscure, of the ‘something external to us which says, ‘You shan't!’”

Jemima saw life as though it existed in oppositional terms to us. She was a strong woman, tenaciously dedicated to advancing her family’s fortune at all cost and convinced that life was set against her and her family and needed to be forcefully combatted. Life was not to be trusted and so it was always better to insulate her children from it and prepare for its attacks. “That maternal hold was to hamper him,” writes his biographer,

“at all stages of his first marriage, and it was the primary cause, along with his early ill health, of that prolonged immaturity which left him, in his own estimation, ‘a child until he was 16, a youth till he was five and twenty, and a young man until he was nearly fifty.”

Ironically, Hardy seems to have longed to be with women who were liberated, optimistic and cheerful (due to their natural intelligence, good looks, or family connections) but wound up marrying someone who turned out to be none of these things. A number of passages in this biography speak of the difficulties that Thomas Hardy had as the husband of Emma Gifford Hardy. Millgrave tells us that Hardy’s bleak outlook comes partly from his acceptance of Darwinism and partly from the gloom that Hardy was susceptible to when he found himself comparing his married life to his ideals as a young man. Hardy made the following note on his 25th birthday for example:

“Walked about by moonlight in the evening. Wondered what woman, if any, I should be thinking about in five years time.”

He could not have imagined that that woman would be Emma Gifford. It seems clear that he was somewhat of an incurable romantic his whole life. Which makes the decision of Emma Gifford all the more remarkable. It is as if he had, through his idealism, made himself vulnerable to someone who knew how to make herself look like his ideal (for a time). If you have read Jude the Obscure, you may recognize Emma in the character of Arabella. “There can be little doubt that Hardy's engagement and eventual marriage to Emma Gifford were in some measure the calculated outcome of a conspiracy,” says Millgate,

“ – if only of discretion – involving the entire rectory household. But if he was ‘caught’ by Emma, it is no less true that he was in the early stages of their courtship entirely captivated by her: he did indeed return from Lyonnese with ‘magic in his eyes.’”

I remember seeing a bumper sticker once that said “I think you are mistaking me for the person you think I am.” It seems that Hardy did this with Emma (with a little help). Through most of his several decades of marriage to Emma, he seems to have retained the feeling that he had, in some sense, married “fool’s gold.” She certainly expressed her lack of adoration for him in manifest ways though his appropriation for her was, it seems, always bleeding out of the characters of his novels. Soon after their marriage, she took a turn towards a more radical anti-Catholic and even “obsessive” Evangelical Protestantism while he made his way ever further from orthodoxy altogether. He found her faith naïve and she found his “meliorism” morbid. “He understands only the women he invents,” Emma once complained to a friend in a letter, “ – the others not at all.” “Letter writing is my only resource for having all the say to myself,” she complained to another, “and [thus] not hearing his eloquence dumbly.” Her secret journals, it was later discovered were full of criticisms of him and his work. A quote from the biography illustrates,

“One source of Emma’s detestation of Jude was the cheerlessness of its presentation of the human condition, and by the mid-1890s she was moving away from Hardy intellectually no less decisively than he was moving away from her emotionally. His increasingly outspoken criticism of established institutions and values ran directly counter to her own deepening religiosity, centered as it was in an old fashion evangelicalism . . .”

According to Millgate, Hardy never really got over the feeling that he began feeling soon after their marriage that he had somehow been the victim of false advertising.

“Emma’s mild adventurousness in intellectual matters – Hardy once said she had been an agnostic at the time of their first meeting – may have been accompanied by some degree of sexual freedom, and Hardy’s later sense of having been personally cheated in marriage was perhaps founded upon an exasperating parallelism between Emma’s sexual advances and retreats and her gradual shift from religious doubt to evangelical orthodoxy and even a form of religious mania.”

“It has never struck me that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably female," Hardy asserted to a friend.

“however, this is to ‘sidestep the general question whether marriage as we at presently understand it, is such a desirable goal for all women as it is assumed to be; or whether civilization can escape the humiliating indictment that, while it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, and literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.”

His memories of the moment in his own life where he “veered off course” may well be recorded in the following poem about Emma:

“Even then the scale might have been turned against love by a feather, but crimson one cheek of hers burned when we came in together “

There certainly was some “flame” there when it all began but at a certain point - it is difficult to know who started this cycle of coldness in the relationship – the “first love” was lost entirely. Hardy does not typically complain about his wife out loud but it would have been difficult to have been married to him while he made the sorts of assertions that he did about how unfair and unjust it was of society to make people stay together. [See footnote] “As the narrator in Hardy’s novel The Pursuit of the Well Beloved observes

‘in their ill matched junction, on the strength of a two or three days passion, [couples feel] the full irksomeness of a formal tie which, as so many have discovered, [does] not become necessary till it [is] a cruelty to them. . . .

‘To me,’ [Hardy] declares with one of his characters, ‘healthy natural instinct is true law, and not an act of Parliament.’”

“You know what I have thought for many years,” he writes in another letter,

“that marriage should not thwart nature, & that when it does thwart nature it is no real marriage, & a legal contract should therefore be as speedily canceled as possible. Half the misery of human life would I think disappear if this was made easy.’”

How would the wife of such a man think about herself I wonder? Millgate, does his best to give Emma Hardy his sincere compassion. “Hardy was too apt to find confirmation of that view in his own experience,” he suspects,

“too rigid in his judgment of Emma, too quick to abandon hope (always an enticing prospect for one of his temperament) and settle comfortably into a self-justifying satisfaction at being so cruelly frustrated by fate and circumstance – by the treachery of the flesh, the elusiveness of the well beloved, and the injustice of the prevailing social order.”

Did Emma create her husband’s coldness or did Thomas Hardy create hers. The jury, says Millgate, might go either way. But the documentation with respect to the challenges that Emma Hardy put in the way of her husband’s affections seems to outweigh the counter-evidence. A few passages suffice:

“But while it is proper to give Emma her due, to perceive her as, equally with Hardy, a victim of the situation created by the mismatching of families, temperaments, and emotional needs, it is impossible to ignore the almost universal contemporary impression of her as opinionated, inconsequential, vain, tiresome, and often downright disagreeable. . . Impatient of distractions, contemptuous of domestic squabbles, concerned for the efficiency of his daily habits of life and work, Hardy was in the end obliged, in the interest of basic survival as a man and an artist, to have recourse to that policy of maximum separateness which, Emma had been the first to promulgate.”

He refers to a letter Emma had written to a friend going through marital difficulties herself, a letter in which Emma suggests that avoiding a husband altogether may be the best policy.

“I can scarcely think that love proper, and enduring, is in the nature of man – as a rule – perhaps there is no woman whom ‘custom will not stale’. There is ever a desire to give but little in return for our devotion, & affection – their [love] being akin to children's – a sort of easy affectionateness – & at fifty, a man's feelings too often take a new course altogether; Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, & he wearies of the most perfect, & suitable, wife chosen in his earlier life. Of course he gets over it usually, somehow, or hides it, or is lucky!”

“Keeping separate a good deal is a wise plan in crisis – in being both free – & expecting little neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may set your heart on – love, interest – adoration, & all that kind of thing is usually a failure complete –“

Ultimately, Emma Hardy came to dislike her husband and to complain about him secretly and publically. She made it clear that he was someone she “put up with.” Thomas Hardy seems to have put his disappointment with her into his novels, coming ever more close to articulating just how disappointed he was with his choice in life by creating a succession of characters who made similar mistakes to the one he saw himself as having made. At the risk of giving the impression that all Millgate talks about is the Hardy’s marriage (it is not), here are some of those relevant passages from the biography.

“Hardy had become accustomed over the years to Emma’s childlike, sometimes charming, often exasperating inconsequentialisms, and he long remained anxious to sustain the marriage as both a public and private reality. But he knew of no response other than silent and henpecked endurance to her open displays of antagonism, her public scoldings, her sudden, unannounced gestures of intellectual and personal independence.”

“The disappointments of Hardy's marriage, the absence of children, the early fading of Emma’s physical charms, persistence and every exaggeration of her various affectations, pretensions, and gaucheries – were a source of great sadness to a man whose imagination was deeply erotic, whose appreciation of women as emotional and intellectual beings was unusually sharp, whose need of social and sexual as well as creative reassurance was particularly great, and who was drawn by instinct and upbringing towards habits of rootedness and retirement, the values of the hearth and the continuities of family tradition. It was, however a disappointment he bore, if not exactly with stoicism, nor without yearning glances elsewhere, yet without open complaint. . . . There is no criticism of Emma, in any of Hardy surviving correspondence, either before or after her death, and only the most occasional and unspecific references, in letters to friends who knew Emma, to those domestic embarrassments which, in the early years of the new century, made it increasingly difficult for him to invite people to stay at Max Gate [The name of their home].”

“In London, however [Emma’s] looks, manner, and conversation were becoming an increasing source of embarrassment. Whatever his own feelings about his wife, Hardy was too much of a novelist to remain long unaware of her failure to adapt herself to the circles into which he introduced her. He knew that she was perceived as plain, foolish, and overdressed, and that he himself was often scorned or pitied on her account. He also discovered that there were in London numerous women, handsome, intelligent, and well dressed, who were ready and even eager to claim his attention and be seen in his company. His natural, if not especially admirable, response was to leave Emma behind, at Max Gate or in their London lodgings, whenever he decorously could. For a time, she accepted the situation dutifully enough. It was only later – and particularly after Hardy had seemed in Jude the Obscure to be attacking not only the institution of marriage but, by implication, his own marriage – that she was roused to active, bitter, and permanent protest.”

Read through the lens of this sense of frustrated idealism, and you can see why Hardy wants to make examples of his various heroes and heroines every time they choose partners for superficial reasons and reject soul mates for the same. Jude Hawley, Sue Bridehead, Bathseba Everdeen, Angel Claire, Michael Henchard, Thomasin Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Grace Melbury, or Lady Constantine all could tell the same moral tale. “Make a mistake here and you pay with a life of regret and there will be no fixing it," he seems to keep saying. Hardy was particularly fond of his last great novel, Jude the Obscure because it, “pulled out all the stops” so to speak. There is a scene where Jude finds himself staring at his new wife Arabella as she heartlessly guts a pig and he wonders, how in the world he managed to wind up with her. It is a scene that many of his critics thought went overboard. He defended himself by saying that he wanted to create a memorable scene where the reader could see in stark clarity “the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, & the squalid real life he was fated to lead.” “ The throwing of the pizzle (pig innards) , at the supreme moment of his young dream,” he continued in his defense,

“is to sharply initiate this contrast. But I must have lamentably failed, as I feel I have, if this requires explanation & is not self-evident. The idea was meant to run all through the novel. It is, in fact to be discovered in everybody's life – though it lies less on the surface perhaps than it does in my poor puppets. ”

Hardy wants people to look at their lives and ask themselves “Where did I go wrong? Was it not when I surrendered my dreams to something or someone and then refused to back out of it?” Perhaps Jude the Obscure was particularly offensive to the people who read it because many people have to deal with this dichotomy between their dreams and what they wind up with (in marriages, in children, in careers, etc.) and the pain of that differential makes them want something else in their literature altogether. Literature must be for them their escape. Hardy’s novels are like a cup of hot tar to a drowning man.

One might ask, “what kept Thomas and Emma hardy together?" Ironically, the answer may be simple as well as ironic. Social pressure. “Hardy was entirely capable of whittling down his position by a kind of slow friction until it had shaped itself into a single unmistakable point,” writes Millgate,

“and then of adopting the direction indicated with a dogged and implacable absoluteness. Though a man of radical thought, Hardy was never man a radical action.”

In short, Hardy was willing to argue for positions he was afraid to take without social permission. It seems as though he wrote his novels in a vain effort to change society into such a society as would make it possible for he and Emma to separate without bringing down condemnation on themselves. He saw their marriage as a mistake but understood that society would not let them undo it without a cost.

Millgate writes of Hardy’s companionship with Florence Dugdale, his secretary (and, after Emma died, his second wife (several decades younger than him),

“The developing relationship with Florence Dugdale reinforced – or reawakened – Hardy’s old susceptibility to feminine companionship and caused him to fret anew at the restrictions placed upon him by his own marriage – legal restrictions chiefly, but also moral ones . . . He also shrunk, at this time and later, from the hostile publicity that would inevitably accompany such a step.”

With all this as backdrop, one can understand the motivations behind his writing of Jude in stark relief. He is writing a caricature of his own life. His main character, Jude Fawley is, like Hardy himself in younger days, an architect. Thomas Hardy draws up a story from the artesian well of his imagination that highlights the tragedy of what he sees in his own life. A young man is “willingly seduced” and entrapped by someone he is no match for and who is herself, made miserable by mutual incompatibility. “He seems, therefore, to have determined from the first,” writes Millgate,

“that he would in Jude say his say without hesitation or compromise – that he would denounce, once and for all, those denials of educational and sexual justice, of simple humanity, which he saw as actually and symbolically implicit in the British social structure and class system, and give expression at last of feelings which had been simmering in his memory and his imagination since before The Poor Man in the Lady. But while he had deliberately used the success of Tess of theD’Urbervilles as a springboard from which to launch the final comprehensive challenge Jude, he remained quite unprepared for the violence of the critical response, the psychological stresses consequent upon so expansive and painful a public exposure.”

Hearts Insurgent was to be the original title of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure suggesting that he was writing it almost as a romantic manifesto against the notion that marriage must be eternal or that classes and social roles must be impermeable.

“Hardy second title, The Simpletons, signaled a shift of emphasis to the idealistic folly of a young couple who attempt to share a private and independent life, isolated from the values and prejudices of the society which surrounds them; it also reflected wryly upon his doomed attempts to create an oasis of satisfaction within the desert his own marriage had increasingly become.”

‘Let us off and search, and find a place / where yours and mine can be natural lives’: so begins his poem, The Recalcitrance, which preserves another of the abandoned titles for Jude. This is the “grand motive” of the life which Jude and Sue try to make together in Jude the Obscure. For Hardy, the attempt is doomed given the society in which they live. All that seems left to him is regret for opportunities lost. Memories of women who he might have married that he tries in vain to “unsight.”

“Not a line of her writing have I, not the threat of her hair, No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby I may picture her there; And in vain do I urge my unsight to conceive my lost prize At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were upbrimming with light, and with laughter her eyes.”

“That Hardy chose to publish this poem as early as 1898, says Millgate,

“is evidence in itself that his affectionate memories of his dead cousin were unclouded by guilt or self-reproach – except in so far as the unhappiness of his own marriage had given him cause to regret past failures to claim Tryphena or Louisa Harding or either of the Nichols sisters or any of the other young women whom his idealizing memory transformed into ‘lost prizes’.

“All his life Hardy was to be highly susceptible to the attraction of women only briefly glimpsed or slightly known,” the biography informs us,

“ – The Well Beloved, fantasy though it may be, speaks with remarkable directness to its author's condition.”

Hardy’s novel, The Well Beloved is about a man searching for and never finding his ideal (one of the Hardy novels I have yet to read).

I feel sad for Thomas and Emma Hardy. Perhaps I can empathize with them. There can be a certain loneliness in marriage that is more painful than being alone. Hardy speaks with the voice of a depressed and beaten man. “Hurt my tooth at breakfast time,” he writes in his journal,

“I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle, and the sad fact that the best of parents could do no better for me. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!”

HE has internalized rejection by this point in time and become unable to see anything beautiful in himself. There is pathos in the eventual coldness that chills the very air of his home.

“And while the program of keeping apart, suggested by Emma, embraced by Hardy, made for a reduction in day-to-day tensions, is also entrenched their basic differences to the point at which they finally stopped listening to each other.”

And I suppose there is a certain irony that he had begun his studies as a young man with the intention of going into the ministry. “Hardy, in 1865, had not yet abandoned his clerical dream nor consciously discarded his religious beliefs,” writes his biographer in one of the early chapters,

“It seems entirely possible, in fact, that he never did experience a ‘loss of faith’ of the classic Victorian kind. His attraction to the church seems always to have depended not so much upon intellectual conviction as upon the emotional appeal of its rituals and, later, upon its perceived possibilities as an avenue of social and especially educational advancement. . . . The erosion of Hardy's religious convictions was thus a gradual process rather than the consequence of a single moment of crisis, and he was never to lose entirely his imaginative adherence to the church, his love of its music and its services, and his belief in its civilizing and socializing functions.”

Sadly, even his obvious talent as a writer often earned him more abuse than praise. After the heaping of abuse that his novels Tess, and especially Jude received, he exclaimed,

“Well, if is this sort of thing continues no more novel writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at”

Admiration was something Thomas Hardy would eventually receive plenty of. Love, one wonders if he ever really knew.

Laws the Cause of Misery, Thomas Hardy, 1912

I HAVE already said many times, during the past twenty or thirty years, that I regard Marriage as a union whose terms should be regulated entirely for the happiness of the community, including, primarily, that of the parties themselves.

As the English marriage laws are, to the eyes of anybody who looks around, the gratuitous cause of at least half the misery of the community, that they are allowed to remain in force for a day is, to quote the famous last word of the ceremony itself, an ‘amazement,’ and can only be accounted for by the assumption that we live in a barbaric age, and are the slaves of gross superstition. As to what should be done, in the unlikely event of any amendment of the law being tolerated by bigots, it is rather a question for experts than for me. I can only suppose, in a general way, that a marriage should be dis solvable at the wish of either party, it that party prove it to be a cruelty to him or her, provided (probably) that the maintenance of the children, if any, should be borne by the breadwinner.

Question for Comment: If it is generally true that hard things in life require acceptance to overcome, is that always true?

P.S. You can find a recently updated version of the same biography HERE.

08/16/2012

The fact that this documentary headlines California Congressman Henry Waxman grilling Allen Greenspan about the flaws in his pro-market, anti-regulatory ideology will clue you in to the economic perspective that this analysis is going to give you. Question: Why the economic crisis? Answer: Wealth inequity. The rest is detail.

The real crisis we are given to understand is this: “While incomes were falling, house prices were rising.” “The fatal flaw,” was a mistaken belief (some would say a lie) that said, “real estate values will always go up.” Based on that belief, people bought more house or houses than they needed. They borrowed more money against their homes than they should have. They paid more for houses than was wise. They accumulated more credit card debt with their homes as collateral than they should have. They accepted lower wages than they might have.

The Flaw makes the case that a capitalistic economy cannot survive if it gives excessive amounts of profit to a few people who, instead of spending it or paying workers with it, simply purchase assets that will make them more. “We [were] transferring all that money from people who would spend it to people who don’t need it and won’t spend it,” one of the interviewees opines. “We said, don’t worry, continue to spend as though your income is going up but the only way you do that is through debt.”

The case is made that a home has generally been seen as a commodity – something that you buy in order to use. When people began buying houses to serve as assets – something that you buy in order to sell and make money on later, they began to act in historically anomalous and unpredictable ways – ways that did not “make sense” to those who were looking in the rear view mirror for their understanding of where the future would go.

One of the homeowners interviewed explains the emotional devastation that resulted from his loss of home ownership. “To have achieved a measure of respect in life;” Ed Andrews, Economics Corespondant New York Times says,

“to have worked hard as a correspondent in Washington at a famous Newspaper and having been a part of the establishment to now to see yourself plunged down to being a debtor the likes of which are being made fun of all over is just an awful experience. It’s the kind of thing where you find out you are not as strong as you thought. You are a whole lot more foolish than you thought. And furthermore you have lost, maybe, almost everything that you had in terms of your financial assets and maybe even in terms of your marriage. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

One of the most interesting moments in the film for me was the segment where you get to see a computer screen full of securitized loans and you can look down the tables and see, in abbreviated symbols, the record of people paying and then failing to pay their mortgages over successive months. You see lines of code that read like this: CCCC3CC33C69FA

This is a story of a family staying current on a mortgage – then going three months without payment. They survive some event and start paying again for two months. Then they pay three months late, and again three months late. Catch up again and then go six months, and then nine. Then foreclosure begins and ultimately removes them from their home. In simple letters and numbers, you are watching a family die economically because they are not making enough to pay what they have borrowed. “Its somebody’s life,” the analyst being interviewed says, pausing to reflect on how efficiently that tragedy can be told in such simple terms.

By the time we are done, we have seen a compelling argument for some sort of governmental action; is it wealth distribution or just regulation? We are not sure. All we know is that it involves some process whereby people who work get paid more and people who live by exploiting the weaknesses and foolishness of others get less. Ultimately, we are given to understand, we have to stop paying people whose primary skill in life is the ability to exploit other people’s weakness so much. Words from the Biblical book of James come to mind:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”

I find it instructive that the condemnation is not leveled against those who have wealth so much as against those who get it by exploitive means – mechanisms that transfer profit from those who do the work to those who do the deals.

The closing credits roll by to the sound of Judith Edelman singing Every Man Jack.

Jack built his house on sand. It sure looks good on paper Jack’s a fortunate man. Let’s build a house like that So we can be just like Jack. Just like Jack. But when the sand begins to rub away The way that sand does, we gather round and say “That’s where the house that Jack built was” Now why did they build his house like that? House Like that? Watch out It’s tumbling down Round every thing Jackie loves . . . He’s keeping up appearances so no one knows How bad it’s gonna get for all of us cracker Jacks. All of us Cracker Jacks.

Question for Comment: As you look at your own economic history, can you identify some flaw in the way that you thought reality worked that you have paid for not seeing?

08/05/2012

Thinking Fast and Slow is about the different systems you have for thinking and how knowing more about them can help you to think better. Kahnman calls these systems, “System 1” and “System 2.” System 1, has evolved (or been designed) to give you fast answers to survival questions. It was not designed for accuracy so much as speed. It does not like inaccuracy but it will trade a little for survival. If it gets you out of the way of a T-Rex, it does not mind if the T-Rex was actually a falling tree.

System 2 is logical and procedural. But it is inherently lazy and quite satisfied if System 1 does all or at least most of its work. The experiments that Thinking Fast and Slow is rife with all draw the same conclusion: System 1 is impossible for us to shut off and. System 2 is very difficult to get to stay awake. This is something that Kahnman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) stresses over and over. “The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome,” he writes,

“The message of these examples is not encouraging. Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent.”

“. . . Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”

“The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult for us to accept because, naturally, it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”

We may not like it but experiment after experiment shows it to be true: “System 1 constructs a story and system 2 generally believes it.” And, I might add, in his conclusion, the author asserts that no amount of study will cure us. “System 1 is not readily educable,” he says there,

“Except for some effects that I attributed mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely.”

“The [only] way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcements from System 2. . . . We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize then perceptual illusions.”

And cognitive illusions is what this book is all about exposing. Kahnman treats us to a cornucopia of human thinking errors that we cannot seem to defend ourselves from even when we know they exist (just as you can’t “unsee” an optical illusion even if we know it is one.)

Start with a simple word problem:

“A bat and ball costs $1.10. The bat cost one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

If you are like most people, you immediately leap to the solution. 10 cents.

But the answer is 5 cents.

And the problem is that once System 1 produces an answer that causes no anxiety or survival concern, system 2 yawns, goes to sleep, and says, “fine by me.” “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe,” writes Kahnman,

“System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. . . . When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.”

System 1 is, as the author puts it, “radically insensitive” to quality and quantity of information when it process. It suffers from what Kahnman calls a serious WYSIATI problem (What you see is all there is). In other words, it really could care less about information that it doesn’t have. Thus, “if a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it [instead].” It literally has been tasked with getting answers fast and if it has to replace an unanswerable question or lengthy question with an unasked but answerable one, it will do it.

At the risk of sounding like this is all a joke, most of us will agree with these conclusions intuitively. But Kahnman makes it clear that we are all far more confident in our System 2 process than we have reason to be. “Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2,” he writes,

“In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions – an endorser rather than an enforcer.”

We do not realize, he argues, just how often our System 2 processes let us get away with illogical murder. Time after time, the research shows that “the emotional tail wags the rational dog.” As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed, “disbelieving is hard work, and System 2 is easily tired.” Or, as Kahnman puts it on one aphorism, “System 2 is not impressively alert.” Many chapters of the book are dedicated to showing how this is so. “The exaggerated faith in small samples,” he says with respect to how easily convinced we can be by insufficient evidence for example

“is only one example of a more general illusion – we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

“As we saw in the discussion of the law of small numbers that a message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. The gist of the message is the story, which is based on whatever information is available, even if the quantity of the information is slight and the quality is poor: WYSIATI”

“You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from information available to you, and if it is a good story, believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

“The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential.”

“We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true. The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that is compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions”

Kahnman talks about the fundamental irrationality that results from the loss aversion of System 1. Essentially, your “fast thinker” weighs loss more heavily than potential gain in its calculations. As he puts it, “loss aversion is built into the automatic evaluations of System 1. . . . Animals, including people, fight harder to prevent losses than to achieve gains.”

“giving up a bottle of nice wine is more painful than getting an equally good bottle is pleasurable.”

His chapter on this subject goes into some detail as to how this reality causes investors to lose millions if not billions of dollars a year. In a similar vein, he shows how System 1 will be dominated by vivid imagery far more than it will be by statistics (which would make a far more reliable foundation for a decision). Vivid imagery, you will recall, can be thought about fast but statistics can’t . . . so System 1 doesn’t bother with them too much. This is why System 1 (when combined with lazy system 2 thinking) leads to frequent error. If parents of a sick child are told of a potential cure and the doctor says that the “one month survival rate is 90%.” The parents are likely to respond very differently than they would to the sentence “There is 10% mortality in the first month.” “The logical equality of the two descriptions is transparent,” says Kahnman,

“and a reality bound decision maker would make the same choice regardless of which version she saw. But System 1, as we have gotten to know it, is rarely indifferent to emotional words: mortality is bad, survival is good, and 90% survival sounds encouraging whereas 10% mortality is frightening.”

“An important finding of the study is that physicians were just as susceptible to the framing effect as medically unsophisticated people,” the book adds, “Medical training is, evidently, no defense against the power of framing.”

“Reframing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy. Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.”

As I often tell my philosophy students, many of our ethical dilemmas are resolved by the people who give us the vocabulary we choose to think about them. One of Kahnman’s chapters talks about the errors we make because we are not aware of the fact that we make decisions as “experiencing selves” and “remembering selves” and that the two are not necessarily working in collaboration with each other. He gives details about a specific experiment where people are given a painful experience and a less painful experience where the less painful experience simply ends with more pain. Because of the ending, the remembering self remembers the less painful experience as something more to be avoided in the future. “The experiencing self,” he writes,

“is the one that answers the question: Does it hurt now? The remembering self is the one that answers the question: How was it, on the whole? Memories are what we get to keep from our experience of living, the only perspective that we can adopt and as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

You can see this dichotomy between experiencing self and remembering self if you conduct a little thought experiment about your next vacation. Imagine that at

“the end of the vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow potions that will wipe out all your memories of the vacation. How would this prospect affect your vacation plans? How much would you be willing to pay for it, relative to a normally memorable vacation?”

Some people, Kahnman suggests, “say that they would not bother to go at all, revealing that they care only about the remembering self, and care less about their amnesic experiencing self than about an amnesic stranger.” System 1 will often make illogical decisions because of its more intimate relationship to the remembering self than to the less important experiencing self.

One more example of an Achilles heel in System 1 thinking ;

“Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson introduced the word miswanting to describe bad choices that derive from errors of fact in forecasting. This word deserves to be in everyday language. The focusing illusion is a rich source of miswanting, in particular, it makes us prone to exaggerate the effect of significant purchases or changed circumstances on our future well-being.”

If you have ever bought a new car or shoes or house, you know this is true. We are grievously prone to miscalculate the happiness that we will get from such purchases. We are notorious “miswanters” (You don’t need to be a Buddhist to understand this.)

The implications of Kahnman’s argument are both personal and political. If one agrees with him, one has to conclude that we humans need some protections from ourselves. We need a scaffolding that will counter our natural weaknesses. “Although humans are not irrational,” he says,

“they often need help to make more accurate judgments and decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help. These claims may seem innocuous, but they are in fact quite controversial. As interpreted by the important Chicago school of economics, faith in human rationality is closely linked to an ideology in which it is unnecessary and even immoral to protect people against their choices. Rational people should be free, they should be responsible for taking care of themselves. Milton Friedman, a leading figure in that school, expressed this view in the title of one of his popular books: Free to Choose. The assumption that agents are rational provides the intellectual foundation for the libertarian approach to public policy: do not interfere with the individual's right to choose, unless the choices harm others.”

“Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them. The decision of whether or not to protect individuals against their mistakes therefore presents a dilemma for behavioral economists. The economists of the Chicago school do not face that problem, because rational agents do not make mistakes. For adherents of the school, freedom is free of charge.”

“Humans also need protection from others who deliberately exploit their weaknesses –“ Kahnman adds, “and especially the quirks of System 1 in the laziness of System 2.”

The implications for government policies towards things like “saving for retirement” or “luxury taxes” is self-evident. And on a personal level, we must – as we mature, build into our lives external thinking mechanisms to offset our inbred “foolishness.”

“System one registers the cognitive ease with which it processes information, but it does not generate any warning signal when it becomes unreliable. Intuitive answers come to mind quickly and confidently, whether they originate from skills or from heuristics. There is no simple way for System to 2 to distinguish between a skilled and a heuristic response [a response based on a simplified abstract]. It's only recourse is to slow down and attempt to construct an answer on its own, which it is reluctant to do because it is indolent. Many suggestions of System 1 are casually endorsed with minimal checking, . . This is how System 1 acquires its bad reputation as the source of errors and biases.”

Lacking an internal warning signal, perhaps we need external ones. Perhaps another word for these “brakes” on our tendency for error is the word “friend.”

Question for Comment: Do you think the record of your life shows you to be better or worse at decision making than most? What is the source of most of your worst “life decision errors”?

08/03/2012

This is a book of short pithy statements uttered in the course of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing life. They are merely soundings into his varied, changing, and creative mind. In some respects, they capture the essence of Transcendentalism. In other respects, they capture only Emerson. But perhaps I repeat myself.

Emerson’s ideology is not an ideology but a method leading to many. Emerson’s world is as polytheistic as the population and there are as many scriptures as there are people who can write and find paper. Lets just start with the basics.

“The highest revelation is that God is in every man . . . Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.”

To Emerson, we are all just too close to divinity to live lives undivine.

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can!”

This is why men must declare themselves without feeling that they must prove themselves. “I delight in telling what I think,” Emerson writes, “but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.”

Seeing makes a man a Torah scholar – nay a Torah giver. This affects everything that Emerson talks about from the writing of history to the purposes of education to the value of a religion. IF God is in every man, and in every man equally …

Here is how it affects the way we should think about history:

“The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.”

“The great value of Biography consists in the perfect sympathy that exists between like minds. Space & time are an absolute nullity to this principle. An action of Luther’s that I heartily approve do I adopt also. We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons painfully unlike us or so little congenial to our highest tendencies & so congenial to our lowest that their influence is noxious & only now and then comes by us some commissioned spirit that speaks as with the word of a prophet to the languishing nigh dead faith in the bottom of the heart & passes by & we forget what manner of men we are. It may be that there are very few persons at any one time in the world who can address with any effect the higher wants of men. This defect is compensated by the recorded teaching & acting of this class of men. Socrates, St. Paul, Antoninus, Luther, Milton have lived for us as much as for their contemporaries if by books or by tradition their life & words come to my ear. We recognize with delight a strict likeness between their noblest impulses & our own. We are tried in their trial. By our cordial approval we conquer in their victory. We participate in their act by our thorough understanding of it.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about education:

“The aim of a true teacher now would be to bring men back to a trust in God and destroy before their eyes these idolatrous propositions : to teach the doctrine of the perpetual revelation.”

"I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?—they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

“I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing and arithmetic in order; ‘t is easy and of course you will.

But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought.

If you have a taste which you have suppressed because it is not shared by those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: they must not whisper, much less talk; but if one of the young people says a wise thing, greet it, and let all the children clap their hands.

They shall have no book but school-books in the room; but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shakespeare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith or any other good book, and understands what he reads, put him at once at the head of the class.

Nobody shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without permission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a girl, because the fire falls, or to check some injury that a little dastard is inflicting behind his desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the medal from the head of the class and give it on the instant to the brave rescuer.

If a child happens to show that he knows any fact about astronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear.

Then you have made your school-room like the world.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to educate men.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about what and how we read:

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about church:

“Are you not scared by seeing the Gypsies are more attractive to us than the Apostles? For though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.”

“The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.”

“The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed through the fire of thought.”

“People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

"A good scholar will find Aristophanes & Hafiz & Rabelais full of American history"”

“The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles. Look at our silly religious papers. Let a minister wear a cane, or a white hat, go to a theatre, or avoid a Sunday School, let a school-book with a Calvinistic sentence or a Sunday School book without one be heard of, and instantly all the old grannies squeak and gibber and do what they call 'sounding an alarm,' from Bangor to Mobile. Alike nice and squeamish is its ear. You must on no account say 'stink' or 'Damn.'”

“When I attended church, and the man in the pulpit was all clay and not of tuneable metal, I thought that if men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would

say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about heroes:

“The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about friendship:

“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about writing:

“I think I have material enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."

“There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the universe”

“Only what is private, and yours, and essential, should ever be printed or spoken. I will buy the suppressed part of the author's mind, — you are welcome to all he published”

“I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.”

“Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, — is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

“All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things—the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it—because of its luck & newness. I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent & learned man, a number of flat conventional words & sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely—becoming really a third person, & search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose—& how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, & every sentence a surprise.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about purpose:

“If you have no talent for scolding, do not scold; if none for explaining, do not explain; if none for giving parties, do not give parties, however graceful or needful these acts may appear in others.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.”

“We are always getting ready to live but never living”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about consistency:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

“And I learn from the photograph & daguerre men, that almost all faces and forms which come to their shops to be copied, are irregular and unsymmetrical, have one blue eye & one grey, [that] the nose is not straight, & one shoulder is higher than the other. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from his good & bad ancestors,—a misfit from the start.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about scholarship:

“These being [the scholar’s] functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”

“Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”

“The scholar on the contrary is sure of his point, is fast-rooted, & can surely predict the hour when all this roaring multitude shall roar for him.”

Here is how it affects the way we should think about invention and change:

“Old age begins in the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, "I want something which I never saw before" and "I wish I was not I."

Emerson’s great contribution to America (or his great curse) is to give us all permission to stop seeking and forcing each other to live by some common operating system. He sprains his ankle and within a day he has multiple cures. “On Wachusett, I sprained my foot,” he says,

“It was slow to heal, and I went to the doctors. Dr. Henry Bigelow said, 'Splint and absolute rest.' Dr. Russell said, 'Rest, yes; but a splint, no.' Dr. Bartlett said, 'Neither splint nor rest, but go and walk.' Dr. Russell said, 'Pour water on the foot, but it must be warm.' Dr. Jackson said, 'Stand in a trout brook all day.'”

He is the ultimate relativist, even unto himself. Not only will he not make you agree with him today, he will not even make himself agree with his yesterday’s self. He sees some danger in this, to be sure, but shrugs it off as inevitable. “The child, the infant, is a transcendentalist, and charms us all;” he writes, “we try to be, and instantly run in debt, lie, steal, commit adultery, go mad, and die.” He notes that we must bring some sort of meaning to the particulars of the life we observe but, insists that it be a meaning original to ourselves. “We can never be at peace when we exist in a myriad of facts,” he insists. But we will never be at peace in someone else’s construct.

And among these principle themes, he drops pearls of insight that demonstrate what he means by living life awake.

“Passion though a bad regulator is a powerful spring.”

“Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”

“How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.”

“There are always two parties; the party of the past and the party of the future”

“A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.”

“The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.”

I think it is this celebration of the divine uniqueness of every individual that makes him particularly sad for the loss of his wife, Ellen. He understood that there was no replacing her. There was no getting back what the world lost when it lost her. Though we are all gods, we are all the one and only kind of god like us.

“There is that which passes away & never returns. This miserable apathy, I know, may wear off. I almost fear when it will. Old duties will present themselves with no more repulsive face. I shall go again among my friends with a tranquil countenance. Again I shall be amused, I shall stoop again to little hopes and little fears and forget the graveyard. But will the dead be restored to me? Will the eye that was closed on Tuesday ever beam again in the fulness of love on me? Shall I ever again be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers, & all poetry, with the heart and life of an enchanting friend ? No. There is one birth & one baptism & one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than men."

(Written five days after the death of Emerson’s first wife Ellen.)

Question for Comment: Do you think we have been made happier as a consequence of this tendency to think of ourselves as the authors of new systems of thought?